Assassin

by Tara Moss

  ‘Sanctum Massage?’ he said in a rich American accent, reading her uniform and nodding his head. ‘He didn’t fear you, you know. Maybe I should have convinced him you were dangerous.’

  ‘See, now that surprises me,’ Mak said, her Glock still trained on him.

  ‘Dangerous in that you could make his life difficult, Makedde Vanderwall, he knew that,’ he said, pronouncing her name correctly. ‘But not …’ He glanced towards the spray of blood and torn flesh dramatically colouring the cabinet and wall behind his boss. He did not need to say more. ‘He thought he could hold you off. What now?’ he asked her.

  ‘Now you drop your weapon,’ she ordered.

  He kept the Beretta pointed at her.

  ‘You won’t shoot me unless you have to,’ he said, with a confidence that was jarring. But he was, of course, correct. ‘You’re not a killer.’

  ‘I’ve just killed three men,’ she said coolly. ‘So you can save your psychology for someone else.’

  He absorbed her response without comment and kept his gun out as he visited the bodyguard to check for a pulse. He put his finger to the man’s throat, waited a beat and then stood. Jayden was evidently dead, as he made no attempt to help him.

  ‘Jack didn’t want a guard at all. I couldn’t convince him to get a better one,’ he told her. ‘I’d have insisted on more, but even I didn’t imagine you would come here.’

  ‘And you are Jack’s security advisor, I assume?’

  ‘Something like that,’ he said quietly. ‘So, what will you do? They are dead now. The Australian authorities don’t appreciate vigilantes. You’re already wanted for the murder of a cop.’

  Murder? Jimmy’s dead?

  Mak felt her concentration waver again. Was it true? ‘I need the contract on me cancelled. I want to be left alone. If I’m not left alone, I will do whatever is necessary,’ she told him. ‘I’m not going to live on the run.’

  He nodded. ‘You’ll be left alone,’ he assured her. ‘By me and my people, anyway.’

  Mak squinted at him. ‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t so easily believe that right now.’ She licked her lips. ‘Why don’t you go ahead and convince me exactly how that is going to be possible. What about the Cavanagh empire?’

  ‘There is no Cavanagh empire, Makedde Vanderwall. Not any more. The investors will be gone the moment news of Jack’s death breaks. It’s over.’

  He was probably right.

  ‘It’s been heading this way,’ he said. ‘It was a good run for me, but this was signposted months ago. If it wasn’t you, my guess is it would have been someone else. Or Jack would have done it to himself.’

  The sound of choking interrupted the moment. They both turned towards the kitchen. Jayden — the bodyguard who had so failed Jack — was alive. He rolled onto one shoulder, curled in the foetal position. Mak kept her gun on The American as he walked over to the giant man on the floor and observed his soft, ragged breathing and the large exit wound inflicted by her hollow-point. Just when she expected he might offer help, he lowered his Beretta and discharged it into the side of the man’s head.

  Mak looked away.

  ‘He would not have survived the night,’ The American said simply.

  No witnesses, she thought.

  A hand twitched and stopped. Mak swallowed.

  The American caught Makedde’s gaze and lowered his gun again, inch by inch until it was at his side.

  Her aim remained fixed. ‘So, you aren’t going to shoot me?’ she said.

  ‘For whom? It’s over, Makedde.’

  It’s over. She felt a sting in her eyes and this time she didn’t fight it, had no intention of fighting it. She slowly lowered her Glock, letting hot tears pour freely down her cheeks. ‘It is over,’ she repeated back, genuinely flooded with emotion.

  ‘It’s over.’

  As the muzzle was aimed closely at The American’s right knee, she squeezed the trigger.

  The shot came out with a dull thump, and The American cried out as his kneecap exploded, blood and bone spraying them both. He collapsed to the floor, cradling his wounded leg. Face twisted with pain, he raised his Beretta and it went off as Mak knocked it from his hands, the bullet hitting one of the glass sliding doors behind her and shattering it with a thunderous crash. She kicked his gun away across the floor.

  ‘You know you have no hope of getting away with this,’ The American said through gritted teeth, holding his devastated knee and bleeding out onto the floor.

  ‘I never planned to,’ she said. Her vision was blurry with tears. She stood over him, her gun aimed at his face.

  ‘I’d rather die than raise my child behind bars,’ she told him. ‘But you’re right. I’m not cut out to be a killer.’

  She opened her mouth and put the muzzle inside, one trigger squeeze away from a quick and bloody death. The feel of the hot steel made her heart pound. It burned.

  The man at her feet opened his lips to speak, but nothing came out. He watched with wide eyes as Mak held the gun in her mouth for a tense stretch of time, feeling the hard steel of the silencer against her lips, against her tongue.

  It’s over, she thought.

  It’s finally over.

  And as quick as she’d put it in, she pulled the Glock out of her mouth and threw it across the room, tossing it far from where The American lay.

  ‘It’s over,’ she repeated aloud in a voice choked with tears, and walked to the kitchen, stepping around the feet of the dead guard. She pulled a large kitchen knife from a block next to the stove and walked back to The American, barely noticing the way her hand shook as she held the keen blade. By the time she returned, he had crawled a couple of feet, evidently going for his gun, or the telephone to call for help. There were streaks of his blood across the floor.

  Mak seized the phone cord and cut it with the knife. ‘Don’t try to stop me,’ she warned him and kicked his Beretta further away. She pulled the mobile right from his belt and tossed it, and he didn’t attempt to stop her.

  She left The American on the ground unarmed next to his very rich and very dead client, who lay back in his designer chair in a beam of sunlight, haloed in blood and precious brain tissue. Jack and Damien Cavanagh were both dead. The American’s career was over. He would have to live with his failure.

  It’s over.

  It’s all over.

  Makedde stepped through the sliding doors, shoes crunching on glass, and walked to the shore with the knife in her hand.

  CHAPTER 43

  Detective Inspector Hunt watched the grainy footage on the monitor, barely able to see for the cloud of anger and fear hanging over him.

  ‘Play it again,’ he said in a voice that sounded foreign to his own ears.

  Detective Walsh pressed ‘play’.

  The officers of the newly formed Strike Force Alpha focused once more on the monitor as it gave them the view from a single CCTV camera. Hunt squinted, trying to stay calm as the camera watched a woman’s back with its unemotional, electronic eye. She walked down to the beach, dressed in a polo shirt and khaki shorts, a lone figure in washed-out, grainy colour, growing smaller as she moved towards the shore. The shape of a long kitchen knife could be seen in her right hand, known to be the same one that was missing from a knife block next to the stove in the Cavanaghs’ kitchen. The woman in the footage stopped at the shoreline and sat down on the sand. It was hard to see what she was doing until she stood up again, stripped down to her underwear.

  The figure raised something that looked like the knife and made a couple of quick movements.

  Detective Inspector Hunt shook his head. ‘Again,’ he said.

  His world had changed dramatically in the course of a single phone call; and now, as he sat with the team of homicide officers going over what they had on the triple murder of Jack and Damien Cavanagh and the security guard at the Cavanagh house in Palm Beach, he felt disoriented, his mind racing to catch up with this new reality and what it could mean for him. This investigatio
n would go to the very top. It would be closely monitored by the police commissioner, the international media — even the prime minister. Beneath the surface of his every action, his every statement and command, he wondered how this sudden turn of events would affect him and his future. He wondered if anyone knew about his involvement in blocking the progress of the trial against the Cavanaghs. Discrediting and removing witnesses. Disposing of evidence. He wondered if anyone knew about his involvement in the shooting of Detective Cassimatis, whom he’d known was conspiring against him. Who would protect him now, if his actions were discovered? What assurances did he have? He had none.

  The footage was stopped and rewound.

  The woman — now positively identified as Canadian national Makedde Vanderwall, the prime suspect in the fatal shooting of Detective Cassimatis — had evidently infiltrated the luxury beachfront home of Jack Cavanagh and murdered him, his son, Damien, and a man who had apparently been hired by Damien Cavanagh for protection and did not have a current security licence. Neighbours reported the sound of gunshots and, when a couple of uniformed police nearest to the area arrived, they discovered the bodies of Mr Cavanagh, his son and Jayden Tully in the living area. None could be revived by paramedics and all were pronounced dead at the scene. Three handguns had so far been recovered — a CZ 75 found on the shore, an unregistered Glock on the living-room floor and a unique, silver-plated Smith & Wesson, engraved as a gift to Mr Cavanagh. All had been recently discharged. The house was fitted with CCTV cameras, but the hard drive recording their footage had been intentionally destroyed. Multiple gunshots had damaged the platters inside. No data could be recovered. Ballistic fingerprinting had yet to establish whether the bullets that damaged the hard drive were fired from any of the three recovered weapons.

  But the neighbours also had security cameras. ‘There. Stop there,’ Hunt ordered.

  The group of officers sat forwards on their metal chairs, as if the extra six inches would somehow make it all clear. The figure on the tape appeared to walk out alone from the direction of the Cavanaghs’ back door, then strip down, cut herself with the knife she’d taken from the kitchen and swim out into the water. Straight out. Past the boat, which was still at the jetty. Past the point of visibility. Makedde Vanderwall had abandoned the weapon used to kill Jack and Damien Cavanagh and a car she had stolen from the nearby mall, both covered in prints. She had even left her handbag behind, fitted with a keyhole camera that held a video of the murders, a device she would have become familiar with in her work as a private investigator. The footage, which was still being analysed, proved her unequivocal involvement in the killings, but also indicated the presence of a fourth person — a man who was also wounded at the scene. A trail of blood had been found leading to the security system and out to the driveway, suggesting that this man knew his way around the house and its security features and had been the one to intentionally destroy the CCTV footage.

  The strike force was still working on leads to identify the man and already one Cavanagh employee, Joy Fregon, had said he was a Mr Robert White, a consultant for Cavanagh Incorporated on international security issues. No one by that name existed on the company databases, however, and Hunt had no intention of divulging what he knew. The man in the footage was indeed the man he’d known as Mr White, ‘The American’. Hunt was fairly sure he had never been recognised in public with him, but he could not be one hundred per cent certain. If it was found that he’d met with The American, his career would be over. Even more worrying though, Hunt wondered if Mr White considered him a threat. He was not a man who liked to leave loose ends.

  ‘Go back again. Go back,’ Hunt ordered.

  If only he’d managed to destroy the footage from Makedde’s handbag showing Mr White, so he could not be identified. Surely that was White’s intention in destroying the CCTV footage in the house? He must not have been aware of the device in the handbag. Yet without that tape they would not have the footage showing Makedde Vanderwall murdering Jack Cavanagh in cold blood. He’d been unarmed, and the murder certainly helped the case against her for the Cassimatis shooting. Hunt continued to move the facts around like squares on a Rubik’s cube. Every possible move seemed to bring him closer, and further away, from what he needed to survive the bloody turn of events.

  Again the team watched as the woman in the neighbour’s CCTV footage appeared to hold the knife out, then move it in two quick arcs before dropping it to the sand.

  ‘She’s cutting her wrists.’

  ‘We can’t be sure,’ Hunt protested.

  ‘There’s blood on the knife,’ Walsh pointed out.

  The knife and her bloodstained clothing had been found on the edge of the water. The blood was being tested against that of the murder victims.

  Fuck.

  A triple homicide and suicide? That was how his career trajectory ended? Hunt held a hand over his mouth as the grainy figure in the footage waded into the waves again, disappearing from view.

  CHAPTER 44

  Dear Andy,

  I can’t seem to do anything right. Just know I always loved you and I never meant to hurt anyone.

  Forgive me.

  Mak

  Andy Flynn sat in the interrogation room with his head filled with darkness, regret and rage. He was on the other side of the table this time. The interrogated, not the interrogator. A glass of water had been placed on the Formica tabletop in front of him. It wasn’t quite what he had in mind to drink.

  ‘For the tape I require you to answer, Agent Flynn,’ Detective Inspector Hunt prodded again. ‘Is this the note you found in your pocket?’

  Under the table, Andy clenched his hands into fists.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  That was the note. He could see Makedde’s devastating words from where he sat. She’d slipped the note into his pocket somehow, probably when she’d kissed him goodbye at the café, he realised. Now the note was spread open inside a plastic evidence bag. A fucking suicide note, and he’d found it in his pocket too late.

  How could you do it, Mak?

  Andy could not keep himself from replaying every second of their last encounter. How she hadn’t taken her mirrored glasses off. How she’d seemed resigned about the laptop being destroyed, the corruption. How she’d looked as she’d walked away for the last time, leaving him in that Darlinghurst café. How could she have calmly talked to him the way she had, told him she was pregnant, and then set out on a mission of murder? One she had a slim chance of surviving and no hope of getting away with? Had he reacted so badly that she’d felt she had no choice? Could he have said something different? Followed her instead of letting her walk away? How had he so misjudged the situation? Misjudged her? God knows she’d had to defend herself before. Maybe she’d only meant to entrap Cavanagh, get a confession on her recording device? Maybe she’d just meant to threaten him and it had all gone horribly wrong? Yet she’d slipped him that note, a note she would have written before they even talked. Had she really known how it would end before she’d even said goodbye? That it was a suicide mission? That she’d never see him again? Andy knew he would be asking himself those questions for a long time to come.

  She’s dead. And you didn’t stop it. You couldn’t save her.

  ‘You did not see her?’ Inspector Hunt pressed.

  ‘No,’ Andy said, feeling the sting behind his eyes.

  That was half true, at least. He hadn’t seen her give him the note.

  ‘But you identified her writing. You knew Makedde Vanderwall was a person of interest in your own ex-partner’s death and yet by your own admission you took your time calling in this vital piece of information. Why is that?’

  That Andy had to deal with an interrogation by Bradley Hunt, of all people, was almost too much to bear. He might not have killed Jimmy himself, but Andy knew he was indirectly — or even directly — responsible for his death. And now Mak had been pushed to suicide because of men like Hunt and all the others who had been under Cavanagh’s thumb. A
ndy would not be satisfied until Hunt was out of a job and into a cell, but it would do no good to admit now that he knew Hunt was lying when he claimed Mak had been the shooter, that he knew without a doubt that Hunt was corrupt, that he’d seen the footage from the construction site himself in his hotel room, that he’d spent the night with Mak after Jimmy was shot …

  Wait until Mak’s footage arrives. Just wait.

  It was Monday. It had to be there on Kelley’s desk.

  He had to believe she’d posted it, like she said she had. Mak wouldn’t lie to him. She would keep things from him, perhaps, but she wouldn’t lie. Even if he could not comprehend what she had done at the Palm Beach house — could she really have been responsible for all that bloodshed and violence? — he had to believe that she would not lie to him.

  Andy turned his neck on an angle and it clicked, the muscles releasing. ‘I was distracted. Get it? Jimmy …’ He trailed off. ‘I got the news about Detective Cassimatis and I didn’t notice the note. Maybe I would have on any other day? Who knows? Who knows how long it had been in my pocket? An hour? Two? When I found it I called it in. You think she would leave a note like this and wait around? She was long gone, if she was the one who put it there at all.’

  ‘If not her, who else do you think would put it there?’

  ‘How should I fucking know?’

  ‘There is no need for hostility, Flynn,’ Hunt said.

  Oh yes. Oh yes there is, you fucker. Andy gritted his teeth.

  ‘I think you delayed imparting this vital piece of information,’ Hunt said, pointing at the note, ‘to aid her.’